May 2012

May 31, 2012

Chess is as much a spectator sport as the National Spelling Bee. In other words, not at all.

Spectacle has to be an intrinsic part of any sport apart from some measure of athleticism. Ask the Romans if you don’t believe me. With due deference to those follow it, two intensely inscrutable players moving about pieces on a board falls short of that popular definition of a sport.

Whatever jousting that happens in chess, happens inside the two players’ brains. So unless someone develops an app which can, in real time, visually represent either in animation of the quality of ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ the movie, or find a way for real life actors to enact the moves live on stage, we have to accept that it does not get the buildup that cricket or soccer gets.

As India’s greatest chess player Viswanathan Anand won his fifth World Chess Championship title in Moscow by beating his Israeli challenger Boris Gelfand in a tense tie-breaker, there is some chatter in the social media about why chess does not receive the kind of attention that the just concluded cricket jamboree, the Indian Premier League (IPL), does. Well, for one every move that Anand makes is not followed by taut nymphs in tight tops gyrating in approval. More importantly though, it is not a game that offers any peripheral entertainment at all which is what often draws large crowds to others sports, therefore more corporate money, therefore a much greater media profile.

When Anand or for that matter any player is contemplating their next move there is nothing that the spectator is privy to other than thinking of what they might do in their place. It is not as if Anand gets up from his chair and consults the audience or explodes in a tremendously entertaining rant. My point is chess will never have the obscenely well-endowed corporate and audience patronage enjoyed by other unabashedly spectacle driven sports. Chess demands considerable cerebral energy and imagination and most ordinary people’s idea of sport-based entertainment is anything but.

The image of Anand in a fully buttoned-up blue shirt or Gelfand in a suit and both looking dour hardly allows for popular involvement.

One can bemoan that Anand will never be carried by fans on their shoulders when he returns to his hometown of Chennai, although one can never be sure when it comes to India. Indians love celebration perhaps more than any other people on the planet with the possible exception of Americans.

Obviously, chess is a great game and demands extraordinary focus, imagination, foresight, ruthlessness and intuition. Those who excel in it are generally those who are able to see life from a 1000 different angles. Those great attributes notwithstanding it is not a spectator sport and will never attract a fraction of the attention that other sports do. Unless, of course, we thrown in some taut nymphs in tight tops in the mix.

May 30, 2012

Since the post is all about me, here is a picture of mine purposefully holding a pencil in my mouth

Being asked to comment on or quoted about something, anything, is one of the unquantifiable rewards of my profession. It creates a sense of consequentiality in one’s mind that almost invariably turns out to be transient. But it is uplifting while it lasts.

I have recently discovered that Vinod Mehta, arguably one of India’s best editors, found it worthwhile to quote from a piece I had written about a newspaper he once helmed. The piece was written more than two decades ago and I had forgotten about it altogether. Mehta had then just taken over as the editor of the Indian Post, a daily struggling to make its mark in a media landscape dominated by The Times of India and The Indian Express newspapers.

In his recently released memoir ‘Lucknow Boy’, Mehta writes about many things, including his struggles at the Indian Post as it went about ruffling many feathers in the late 1980s. He had to resign from the newspaper in the midst of political pressures. It is in the context of his news philosophy that Mehta quotes what I wrote for the New York-based weekly India Abroad.

Please disregard the joyful self-absorption of one journalist quoting another journalist about how good a job he was doing as editor and then the second journalist quoting the first journalist to claim some measure of professional standing.

That was more than two decades ago. The other day Subir Ghosh, a friend and fellow journalist from India, reached out requesting a comment or two for a piece he was writing on the rise of Chetan Bhagat, supposed to be India’s highest selling novelist.

Although I am tempted to feign modesty, I think Subir was remarkably perceptive in asking me for a comment because I do offer a cogent perspective on just about anything as long as it does not require serious scholarship.

Read Subir’s piece here. The following are my comments. The ‘He’ in the comment refers to Bhagat.

“Mayank Chhaya, US-based author of Dalai Lama: Man Monk Mystic (Random House,2007), wants to delve deeper. He explains, “He has all the trimmings of a phenomenon, including a media profile far beyond his core substance. In a sense, he could well be a character from one of his own books, someone who has succeeded beyond his wildest expectations by catering to the urban and semi-urban readership that is not particularly discriminating in its literary tastes.”…..

This “phenomenon” we are talking about gradually becomes a Bollywoodisation (pardon the term, please) of Indian fiction in English. Chhaya contextualises it for us, “His success is reminiscent of Hindi filmmakers of the late 1970s, particularly Manmohan Desai who had a grasp of the inner workings of the average urban mind. Bhagat has achieved the rare distinction of reaching a level where the commercial success of his books feeds on itself quite like Desai’s movies did. His books, it appears from afar, market themselves.””

In the glorious tradition of a balanced approach to such writing Subir also quotes another friend and journalist right below me by saying this, “Veteran journalist Kajal Basu disagrees, scathingly so.”

P.S.: I am constructing a huge echo chamber with mirrors placed strategically for journalists to gather and shoot the breeze. That way we can all hear and see ourselves.

May 29, 2012

An 86-year-old semi retired politician, who once not so secretly aspired to be India’s prime minister, had to experience the unseemly act of being coerced into giving his DNA sample to settle a paternity claim.

As politicians go Narayan Dutt Tiwari is as seasoned as you can get. He has been chief minister of India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh three times and once that of a new state carved out of it. In the immediate aftermath of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination on May 21, 1991, he was in the running as his Congress Party’s choice for prime minister. That did not happen.

Tiwari is facing a paternity suit from Rohit Shekhar, 31, who claims the politician fathered him while he had a relationship with his mother Ujjwala Sharma. Tiwari has denied the claim as well refused to give a DNA sample saying he is too old for that. To which judges of India’s Supreme Court retorted, "It does not mean that blood is not running in his body. If you are so clean, you go and give your blood sample.”

Since Tiwari did not oblige, a team of court and medical officials today forcibly took a blood sample. I am curious to find out if the old man was held down and pricked or he resigned to his fate in the face of officials armed with syringes and gave it himself. Either way it is quite a hilarious drama. Did he, for instance, run around his house being chased by the officials with swabs and syringes in their hands?

Even a pulp fiction writer in Hindi could not have conceived of a plot where one of the country’s most high profile politicians, who has spent the better part of his life wielding power, is being coerced into giving his blood.

I am pretty sure this is for the first time in India that a politician has been forced to give a blood sample to establish paternity. Tiwari, of course, is by no means the first Indian politician who might have fathered children out of wedlock.

It is not clear how soon the sample will be tested to establish whether Tiwari is indeed the father or he was tormented in his twilight years for no reason. In 2009, Tiwari had to resign as governor of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh after a video came out allegedly showing him in bed with three women. He cited “health grounds” as the reason for his resignation. Tiwari had dismissed the video as malicious and fabrication.

I had written then that it did make sense for Tiwari to quit on “health grounds” because he was indeed too healthy to waste his time as a governor.

****

India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, right hand corner, with Myanmar’s President Tien Sein during a guard of honor on May 28 (Pic: http://pmindia.nic.in)

I will write a more serious post about the first ever visit of India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Myanmar (Burma) but for now let’s do this uncalled for observation about some silly sartorial detail.

How cool is it to visit a country where men dress up in strikingly colorful sarongs and flip-flops and go to work! Myanmar’s President Tien Sein was in this traditional attire, including the flip-flops, during the ceremonial guard of honor at his palace, Nay Pyi Taw.

Incidentally, I have always detested sarongs or lungis as they are called in India. There is no rational reason for my nearly primal dislike perhaps other than that it is not well defined. One just wraps it around. I grant that you can’t beat its simplicity.

I suspect Dr. Singh might have felt a bit overdressed walking with the Myanmarese leader. Myanmar is a humid place and it makes sense for people to wear as little as possible, including on their feet.

May 28, 2012

Karan Johar, the preeminent confectioner of cloying convivialities and familial pieties often mistaken as movies, has turned 40. To celebrate that landmark he threw what is regarded as a benchmark bash on May 25 in that if you did not get invited your benchmark must be considered bashed.

Apparently the guests were told to show up in very formal and very chic clothes like real movie stars. Most of them were real movie stars. So many men showed up in tuxedos while women in evening gowns in Mumbai's sweltering heat probably struggling to keep their armpits dry. In the run-up to its famous monsoon season, Mumbai is unforgiving of any fabric other than cotton because cotton soaks up moisture and sags as if in deference to the weather.

Johar, who has a reputation for being a great host as well as a particularly generous producer, did not let the guests down going by the media reports. The party drew in who’s who of Hindi cinema, all smiling from ear to ear and dressed from shoulders to toes. Johar himself turned out in a tux with a Tom Ford bow tie. (How, you may ask, am I privy to all this information sitting in my basement? Well, there is that thing called broadband that streams television channels from around the world). There were some like Sanjay Dutt who defied the dress code and showed up in an impossibly comfortable white cotton pathani suit.

Just about now I am asking myself, why in the blue blazes am I writing about Karan Johar, aka KJo, and his birthday party? And that too with such familiarity? One obvious reason is that Karan Johar is a powerful keyword on the net and it draws traffic to an obscure blog like mine. Another reason is that Karan Johar is a powerful keyword on the net and it draws traffic to an obscure blog like mine. There is a third reason but you get the drift. I can guarantee that many more visitors would end up here because of KJo than the number that my post about Pakistan’s power woes brought in yesterday.

It is important for a blog like mine to mix it up in order to ensnare fickle readership by occasionally surrendering to powerful keywords such as KJo and all activities that they are involved in.

Irrespective of what I think of him, Karan Johar has embodied the quintessence of mainline Hindi cinema in the last 15 years, which incidentally is the number of years he has completed as a director and producer. I have nothing but respect for those who regularly create content unmindful of its quality and how it might be received. It may not sound like it but I do mean it as a genuine compliment. Those who consume content do not quite realize that creating it is quite demanding. Its quality comes into question only because it was created in the first place.

I say this as a purely factual statement shorn of any implied slight or smugness but I have seen only a total of 30 minutes of Johar’s two movies ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham’ and ‘Kal Ho Na Ho.*’ But those were enough for me to characterize them as cloying convivialities and familial pieties.Much more important than what I think of Johar’s movies, is the fact that he continues to make them with admirable commitment. From what I have heard of KJo on KJo, he has a healthy and self-deprecating humor about himself, which is always a plus for me.

He has also established himself and his movie production company Dharma as one of Hindi film industry’s most sought after names. All of that has to demand some measure of talent and a great deal of work. It is for that I applaud someone like Karan Johar. Watching his movies is another matter altogether. It is an acquired taste which I have happily failed to acquire.

May 27, 2012

Here is a statistical comparison you are unlikely to hear about Pakistan from the think tank types in Washington D.C. who come up with complex geostrategic formulations.

According to the data maintained by the state-run Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO), the shortfall in the country’s power generation has increased from 3500 megawatt (MW) on May 1, 2012, to 6,000 MW on May 23. What this means is that Pakistan produced nearly 36 percent less electricity than the 16,814MW it generates, which in turn means power outages reaching up to 20 hours a day.

During May, the worst day was May 8 when the shortfall reached 6700MW, which is nearly 40 percent of its total national generation. I chanced upon the story courtesy the IANS wire which quoted The News newspaper of Pakistan. A quick study of official figures published by PEPCO on its site tells the story of a nation that ought to scale down its geostrategic delusions and concentrate on basic needs.

As an aside, power outages are quaintly called “load shedding” in South Asia which makes it sound something positive as in losing weight. Come to think of it load shedding causes one to sweat more and hence lose weight.

When its major cities such as Lahore face up to 14 hours of “load shedding” and rural Pakistan up to 20 hours one has to conclude that it would serve the people of Pakistan much better if the government focused more on power generation than power assertion.

Here is an idea how Pakistan can justify its demand for a 20-fold increase in allowing every NATO truck to transit through its border with Afghanistan. It can say that the resources generated thus would be pumped into creating more electricity for its population. More electricity means greater comforts for its ordinary citizens. Greater comforts mean less angry people. Less angry people mean they are less angry generally about everything, including America. Problem solved.

My facetiousness aside, I think there is an obvious case to be made in favor creating enough electricity in Pakistan so that its economy can pick up pace and in turn create opportunities for education, health, clean water and entrepreneurship.

I am not for a moment suggesting that the power situation in India is any significantly better. Load shedding during the peak summer months from April to June is equally rampant in India. According to one estimate, some 300 million Indians have no access to electricity at all. That number is out of a total 1.4 billion people around the world without access to electricity. That means nearly two Pakistans inside India have no electricity. That is bound to be one angry lot.

It is not too far-fetched to extrapolate the growth of a profoundly disaffected populace from national failure to provide basic facilities such as electricity. Of course, a fully electrified and served Pakistan is also no guarantee against its inherent antipathies towards America. But I would venture that when the sun is baking Pakistani flatlands at 110 degree F. it might be helpful to have fans whirring and water flowing to keep the ordinary people relatively reassured about their lives.

May 26, 2012

Writer, journalist and standup comic Shireesh Kanekar during one of his shows in the United States (Pic: MC)

Given a choice Shireesh Kanekar would describe himself as a writer first, a standup comic next and a journalist last. He has been all three for the better part of the last nearly four decades.

Writing is something that he revels in, comedy is something that he makes others revel in and journalism is something that he hopes no one revels in. With 38 books in Marathi, more than 3000 standup shows of his four distinctly different routines and a few thousand daily and weekly columns, Kanekar has been astonishingly prolific.

It is a measure of the 69-year-old writer’s success that he has become a genre of writing in Marathi known as the “Kanekar style” which many younger writers and columnists imitate and emulate, mostly without knowing it and always without acknowledging it. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but I also want to be paid for it,” is how he once described it to me.

Shireesh’s books are predominantly drawn from newspaper writings known for their incisive and humorous perspective on popular culture, including Hindi cinema, Hindi cinema music and cricket. His admirers believe that given his brilliant storytelling skills and captivating literary style he could have transitioned into a great novelist. He has, however, chosen to remain a satirist because that gives him the license to hold forth on anything and everything.

A list of Shireesh’s works can be found here but it has not been updated with his last five books.

A resident of Mumbai’s Shivaji Park neighborhood, Shireesh says although he has many friends, he has always preferred his own personal shell where he can do back and forth with himself. “I like to believe that I cover all sides of an argument myself and hence do not need a second opinion,” he says.

I have known Shireesh for over a quarter century and regard him as one of my closest friends who expects no explanation and to whom none is offered.

Here is a short interview with him, if only to introduce him to those who do not speak or read his language. He gave up English journalism quite sometime ago because, “It is like pursuing a woman who plays so hard to get. Marathi, on the other hand, courts me.” Some day I will write a bigger piece about him.

Q: First explain what it takes to be so prolific. I think those who do not write for a living do not recognize how hard it is to produce so consistently.

A: I am grateful to you for showing keen interest in my writing world. There seems to be someone other than me to be impressed with my penmanship. We are in a micro-minority. I have entered into a secret pact with myself that I'll continue to write till I drop dead or am physically incapacitated because I realized some years back that I truly live my life only when I write. I am delirious. Nothing else matters. I do not show my writing to anybody before or after it is published. Arrogant as it may sound, nobody's opinion really matters to me. Everybody is welcome to react the way he or she wants but that does not mean that I should take a serious note of it. When Oscar Wilde was asked by his publisher to make certain changes in his manuscript, Wilde said, "How can I improve upon a masterpiece?"

Q: Does it frustrate you that since you write in a language that is not English it makes it economically unviable to survive on it?

A: Surviving on writing in a language other than English in India is nearly impossible. But I am proud to say that I did it for good number of years. I am to the best of my knowledge the highest paid Marathi columnist. It has taken years of sweat and toil to reach this position. The credit for my writing style, which majority of readers find young and fresh despite having written for 38 years without a break, goes to the Almighty.

Q: Your writing is almost entirely based on your rather unusual perspective, point of view, and assessment of life. At what point did you consciously know that that would be your genre of writing?

A: I don't think I have made any conscious efforts to write the way I do. That's me. My admirers fondly refer to my writings as 'Kanekar style.' I don't exactly know what it means. I write what comes naturally to me. No posing, no literary acrobatics. If the readers like my writings, I like to believe that they like me. It is a soothing feeling especially for someone who has lived a loveless life.

Q: How do you think critics treat your writing?

A: I don't think that critics have taken note of my writing and its impact on the readers. That, I believe, happens to most of the humorous writers all over the globe. P.G. Wodehouse is not mentioned in the same breath as Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Earnest Hemingway and many more.

Q: Do you feel that people tend to consider satirical or witty writing not literary enough?

A: Humor takes a back seat when it comes to literary classics. Humor is always regarded as an escape from the tragedies of life. Sad but true. But still I believe that I don't have the recognition that I deserve which is not to be confused with my following and popularity. I have authored 38 books so far. By itself, I concede, the number does not place me on a high pedestal.

Q: A lot of your books are compilations of your newspaper writings. Do you expand those writings for the book format or they are mostly as were?

A: While compiling articles to make a book I do not make any changes. One, I am too lazy for that. Two, I do not see scope for improvement.

Q: There is a general belief among your readers that there are several novels sitting in you. How come you have not chosen to write them?

A: I don't think that I am cut out for novels. The canvass is too big for my comfort. Once (the preeminent Marathi writer and satirist) Pu. La. Deshpande was asked why he did not try his hand at writing novels. He said: "How would I remember the name of a character which I wrote two hundred pages back?" There is more humor than fact in his reply. Each writer has his own field. A novelist is not a poet and a short story writer is not an essayist, unless he is supremely endowed.

Q: Would you find yourself more comfortable as a short story writer or as a regular novelist?

A: Yes, I secretly believe that I would make a successful short story writer. I have that stuff in me. But mentally I am not in a frame of mind where I can jump into a new field. Your health, physical and mental surroundings and many other factors take decisions on your behalf. At 69 one develops that laidback attitude.

Q: You also have a very successful career as a standup comic, more like an observational humorist. Is there an overlap between the writer and the comic?

A: My writing and my standup comedy are two separate things. Wit, which is a part of me whether I am writing, performing or talking in general, is bound to be a common factor. What is humor? It is a way of life, your perspective on things.

Q: How would you describe the state of Marathi popular literature? And how would you describe your position in that?

A: The popular literature today is not as popular as it used to be in yesteryears. The convent educated Marathi boys and girls don't read Marathi literature at all. Mostly those above fifty read. They constitute the major chunk of our readership .I am very well known. In fact, those who run Marathi Mandals in America have read me and hence know me. So I get shows. My standing in literature has helped me get shows. I am a writer first and everything else comes second.

May 25, 2012

Songs that embody the romantic absurdity of Hindi cinema must be in several thousands and it makes zero sense to choose just one as the quintessential representative of that genre. And precisely because it makes no sense, I am going to do it.

Prophets hear divine instruction in serene solitude. I hear these songs. It is not that different.

This particular one from the 1970 movie’ Sawan Bhadon’ (which are the months for the monsoon rains) was produced and directed by Mohan Sehgal. It introduced actors Rekha and Navin Nischol.

Nischol, a generally talented performer who did many forgettable roles, died last year, while Rekha went on to become one of the biggest names of Hindi cinema. She is often described with unintended hilarity by entertainment writers an “enigmatic diva.” Some have even called her the “Greta Garbo” of India. Neither means anything.

In an appointment that underscores her standing, Rekha was recently nominated to the Rajya Sabha or the upper house of Indian parliament.

The song was composed by Sonik Omi and written by Verma Malik. I am deliberately using the English subtitles embedded in the clip because they are are a source of so much mirth for me. I could not tell you with any certainty whether this is the officially sanctioned translation of the song but that would not have made any material difference to its intrinsic sentiment and phraseology.

It is my dream to have the subtitles performed by William Shatner and Angelina Jolie.

My random access memory picked this song from the obscure recesses of my brain early Wednesday morning. It is delightfully corny and panders to my lowbrow tastes and comprehension of the human experience.

Here is a lovelorn young man (Nischol) setting up a trap for his woman (Rekha) in a field. As soon as she walks into the lasso rope, he pulls it and she playfully obliges to be dragged by him. How is that for romantic absurdity?

Throughout the four minutes of the song, the two actors are thrown into what can only be described as hurtfully playful situations. At one point their legs get entangled. The basic premise of the song is that he wants her and says so with unrestrained ardor and she also wants him but rejects him with lovely contempt. That, by the way, is the method of most love songs.

I have translated only one line because it was missed out in the subtitles. My line refers to ‘Aya hai bada chhaila dildar rasiya’ (Oh, the flamboyant romantic is here). It is not my case that the original Hindi lines sound less corny but they at least fit the realm unlike the English translation which is pure comedy gold. It tickles me no end to hear the man reiterate throughout the song that “Our affair in on the roll now.”

Another potentially great pickup line would be “Dil apna kisiko to dogi, Hum kya burey hein?” (You will fall in love with someone, Am I that unworthy?). I like the unfounded optimism of it as well as its low benchmarking.

May 24, 2012

The Indian economy has nothing serious to worry about because a) Its foreign currency reserves as of May 11, remain at a healthy $291.8 billion dollars, according to the Reserve Bank of India and b) Its simian reserves remain healthy enough for monkeys, both the rhesus and the langur, to have practically overrun the streets of Delhi, according to The New York Times.

Give me a moment or two as I establish a connection between a) and b). But before I do that a note for those who may not know it. Doing a quirky feature about the monkey menace in India’s capital is like the required rite of passage for all foreign correspondents. I am told the Indian government has the provision under which it can revoke a foreign correspondent’s visa if he or she does not write at least one monkey story during their posting in Delhi. Now that the Times’ new correspondent Gardiner Harris has successfully dealt with that rite of passage he can get on with the more serious reporting on cows jamming traffic.

Coming back to the growing concern about the falling rupee, foreign currency reserves and simian population, there is some precedent to this. It was exactly two decades ago that India was in the midst of its worst foreign currency reserves crisis. It was sometime in 1991-92 timeframe that India realized that it barely had enough dollars to pay for about two weeks of imports.

Among the measures put in place to shore up the reserves was the export of rhesus monkeys to the West for medical research. There was considerable controversy among animal rights and environmental groups about this decision. The former were worried about the cruelty that such research invariably entails and the latter about it upsetting the ecological balance.

Two decades hence, we know that the rhesus population is going strong and so are the country’s foreign currency reserves. That means the Indian economy is generally doing well. I don’t think any serious economics professor would have the courage to teach this theory. The point is if India ever confronts the kind of crisis it did back then, it can always start aggressively exporting the aggressive population of rhesus monkeys.

Some of you might know that monkeys are worshipped in India as representatives of the monkey god Hanuman. I remember some residents of Delhi rationalizing the export of rhesus monkeys in the early 1990s as Hanuman’s progenies doing the ultimate sacrifice to save India’s honor. In the Ramayan, it is Hanuman and an entire army of apes and monkeys that help save Ram’s kingdom against Ravan. So there, I proved it. Problem solved.

A note of caution: My tongue has remained firmly in my cheek while writing this post.

P.S.: After writing the post I got the following via an unimpeachable source:

May 23, 2012

Two cases at the extreme ends of the spectrum of crime throw a rather lurid light on the Indian American community, frequently hailed as a “model minority” for its generally impeccable conduct.

One involves Dharun Ravi, a barely 20-year-old Rutgers University student who webcammed his roommate’s gay encounter, and the other Rajat Gupta, a 63-year-old hugely successful businessman and banker accused of leaking insider information to a predatory trader.

The purpose of bringing together these two completely unconnected cases, other than the fact that their protagonists share their ethnicity as Indians, is to simply point out that they are both about a certain kind of sneakiness. Gupta’s trial has just begun in New York and until a verdict is delivered he is nothing more than an accused in an insider trading case. Ravi, of course, has been convicted and is facing a 30-day sentence and 300 hours of community service as well as a lifelong blot on his record.

Insider trading tends to be furtive and sneaky because it involves leaking privileged information with the purposes of making pecuniary gains using knowledge that others do not have.Gupta is accused of informing the trader Raj Rajaratnam about Warren Buffet’s decision to invest $5 billion in Goldman Sachs within 60 seconds of the former having learned about it during an emergency call. The banker faces 14 counts of insider trading. Rajaratnam has already been sentenced to 11 years in prison and fined $92.8 million in the same case.

In both cases, the protagonists had no prior record and, in fact, were very much the kind of people who would be held up as examples of the “model minority”. Gupta’s attorneys are strenuously pointing out in court how stellar their client’s reputation has always been. Their basic contention seems to be that a man who led a life of great probity and worked for larger public good had no incentive to act in the manner he has been accused of by federal prosecutors. In short, they are denying that anything sneaky ever happened.

In Ravi’s case, there has been no denial that the sneaky did happen except that its motive was not hate or bias intimidation.

Purely objectively, irrespective of the verdicts the two cases do represent a wide variety of wrongdoing any “model minority” can fall prey to. From bias intimidation that Ravi was accused of to insider trading that Gupta faces, it is quite a range.

It is instructive that while the Gupta trial is going on, news comes of federal regulators wanting to investigate whether analysts at Morgan Stanley and elsewhere advised some of their preferred clients to go easy on the upcoming Facebook initial public offering (IPO) because they knew the company might not have strong second-quarter revenue. This falls within the realm of privileged information that cannot be shared selectively, something which may have happened. Morgan Stanley has denied this happened.

If privileged information was indeed shared, it is extraordinary that this continues to happen in the world of high finance even as a major trial for something similar is going on in that very city.

May 22, 2012

One can debate whether it was a full-blown snub or just a partial ticking-off but Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari ought to have felt hot under his collar at the way he was treated by US President Barack Obama here in Chicago.

Short of asking him “Must you be here?” Obama did everything within the bounds of diplomatic decorum that Zardari should have interpreted as, “Must you be here?”

Since this is just a blog, and hence not governed by the severe journalistic standards I practice in my professional writing elsewhere, I am going to draw a deliberately exaggerated comparison to describe the way Zardari was treated. Bless the blogs for they let you be blessedly direct.

In the mid 1980s I happened to be on the set of a Hindi movie where the director was shooting a dinner scene. There was a lavish spread of food and beverages. Being a party situation, there was a large number of extras milling about with empty plates and glasses. As the camera was about to roll, the man in charge of coordinating the extras, who is often a retired extra himself, gave one last minute instruction, which was utterly shorn of nuance and therefore very effective: “Khana khaneka nahi. Sirf dekhne ka.” (Don’t eat the food. Just look at it).

Zardari’s plight at the just concluded NATO summit was not that different from the extras. Obama did not try to hide his displeasure as was evident in at least two distinct ways. One was that the US president did not meet Zardari one on one citing the shortness of time.

The other was during the session at the NATO summit for public thanks when Obama pointedly left out Pakistan from the list of countries helping the mission in Afghanistan.

"I want to welcome the presence of President Karzai, as well as officials from central Asia and Russia — nations that have an important perspective and that continue to provide critical transit for ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) supplies," Obama said.

To ensure that his displeasure with Pakistan and Zardari was fully registered by all concerned Obama even said that he did not want to “paper over the real challenges.” Obama also rubbed it in that he had a "very brief” exchange with Zardari, “as we were walking into the summit."

All this makes me wonder whether the whole purpose of inviting Zardari was to pointedly ignore him. I am not privy to what might have transpired between the two leaderships behind-the-scenes but it is clear that the US president was unusually bent on showing his displeasure. To be fair, Zardari was invited by the NATO leadership but that would be splitting hairs because nothing happens in the NATO without the US approving it first.

I find it baffling that the president of a strategically decisive state is extended a last minute invitation and when he accepts and attends he is all but asked to stand in a corner. In an interview with CNN, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai described the interaction between him, Obama and Zardari as "three-way photograph taking...just a photo opportunity." This “three-way photograph taking” had to be among the more awkward ménage à troisimages in the history of diplomacy.

While I am on the subject let me repeat something I have been saying for a long time. Being afforded a personal meeting with the US president on the sidelines of a summit has become some sort of a defining benchmark for any head of state to judge his or her own importance.As a result, not being granted one becomes, by implication, a snub if you believe in this sort of non-sense. It is time to stop projecting such personal meetings as a gesture of near divine munificence. We all live in a world where everyone needs everyone else, some more so than the others but still let’s not make it into a measuring rod.

It is difficult to predict how Zardari’s less than amiable visit to Chicago would go down when he reaches home but it is safe to say that it will not make many particularly proud. On this side of the divide Obama could not be unaware of the potential risks of stepping on Zardari’s already sore toes.